The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) forum has developed the de-facto world standard for wireless information and telephony services on personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital mobile wireless telephones, and other mobile wireless devices, collectively referred to herein as “wireless devices”. The WAP standard has been published as an open, global wireless protocol specification based on existing Internet standards, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Internet Protocol (IP), for all wireless networks. WAP empowers users of wireless devices to access easily content such as live interactive information services and applications and display the accessed content on the display screens of the wireless devices. Services and applications include for example e-mail, customer care, call management, unified messaging, weather and traffic alerts, news, sports and information services, electronic commerce transactions and banking services, online address book and directory services, as well as corporate intranet applications.
WAP-enabled wireless devices typically include a Wireless Markup Language (WML) browser instead of a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) browser to enable the wireless devices to access the Internet and view content, without hyperlinks. To start a WAP session, a user must enter the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the web site where the desired content is located into the WML browser. Unfortunately, WAP-enabled wireless devices provide limited facilities for entering text data or commands. Currently text data or commands are entered into WAP-enabled wireless devices using telephone dial pads, alphabets displayed on the display screens of the wireless devices, or styluses in the case of PDAs. Entering text data or commands into WML browsers in these manners has proven to be unsatisfactory.
It is known to use voice recognition for text data or command entry. However, employing voice recognition in wireless devices is not economically feasible due to the limited memory and power that are available in wireless devices. In addition, wireless networks are not generally capable of handling both voice and data over the course of a call. Furthermore, protocol standards for handling both voice and data over the course of a call have been unavailable.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel communication system and method of using speech recognition to initiate a WAP session between a wireless device and an information network over a wireless communications link.